Part 1: Stress, exhaustion, and feeling overwhelmed
Teachers and school leaders face a high level of stress, exhaustion, and burnout. This is not in debate. While these emotions and responses are normal, they can become a problem if they become chronic, when they might pose serious challenges for individuals and the whole workforce.
Understanding stress, exhaustion and burnout is part of our work. If we can be aware and open about these experiences, then we are better placed to care for ourselves and for others – students and colleagues alike.
This article examines the terms, stress, exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed, and seeks to deepen our understanding of what they mean, what they look like in our thoughts and behaviour, and what actions can reduce their harm. Our next article looks in detail at burnout, a state that takes us beyond stress and exhaustion.
Stress, exhaustion, and feeling overwhelmed: how they show up in caring professions
Research shows that feeling stressed, exhausted or overwhelmed is common in the caring professions. Recent research by the Australian Catholic University and Deakin University reveals high rates of stress in teachers and school leaders -- higher than the workforce norm.
In caring professions such as health and education the emotional load is significant. It can be distressing for an educator to discover a gap or mismatch between what they believe should happen – actions they should take – and what they can actually do. The nature of the work itself is therefore part of what creates potential for stress and exhaustion. The reasons why education is rewarding are also why it is so taxing. We want to make a difference, and when things get in the way of that goal, we feel frustrated and exhausted, and deep engagement can dip and fall away.
Other factors, such as the toll of homeschooling and COVID lockdowns, changes in student behaviour, the increased diversity of student needs and learning levels, and the impact of social media and technology use, are also aspects of school and student life that are increasing stress.
Sources of stress can include:
Growing workload (especially in relation to increased administration, new systems)
Managing difficult and challenging behaviour
Keeping up with changes – new reforms and requirements
Managing work alongside personal, family, and health challenges
We all differ in terms of what causes stress, and its level and intensity. Let’s look at what stress, exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed can look like. Understanding how they show up in our lives can help us to identify sources of stress and to know when to act to reduce its impact as much as we can.
What can we do?
Feelings of stress and exhaustion or of being overwhelmed are part of life, and work. Feeling stressed by negative events, new challenges, and huge workloads is normal and plays a functional and adaptive role, signalling the presence of a sudden or looming ‘threat’. While the threat is no longer a lion bounding toward us, it might be a large amount of work coming – such as report writing, a very challenging student or a difficult staff meeting.
When levels of stress or exhaustion become prolonged and chronic, however, the problem becomes greater. The aim is not to prevent and eliminate stress – it is part of life – but to become more skilled at identifying stress and designing small steps – strategies, behaviour, plans – to deal with it and prevent it becoming chronic.
Let’s take a deeper look at these states and the typical symptoms.
Stress is a natural response to difficult and demanding situations and threats.
Our bodies respond by producing adrenaline and cortisol, heightening arousal in order to meet the extra challenge. Our hearts can race, muscles tense, breath become shorter.
We worry about what might happen and how we will deal with it. We can feel heightened emotions, perhaps frustration or irritability and distraction or reduced capacity for attending to other things.
When such feelings continue for a prolonged period of time – above and beyond a response to a particular instance or incident – we are experiencing chronic stress. We can lose sleep and appetite, lose our ability to rest and relax. We overthink and ruminate, which in turn affects our mental health and risks more general anxiety and depression.
Exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed are distinct from stress, but very often lead to stress and a stress response, as described above.
Exhaustion may be physical, mental, or emotional. We feel drained and depleted, and our capacity to do other things falls away.
Feeling overwhelmed is often used interchangeably with stress. While it can often lead to stress, the overwhelmed part describes feeling flooded or overtaken. For example, the request being made or you, or your realisation of what you need to do, feels enormous and all-encompassing, at least in the moment. You feel depleted and drained, and worry that you don’t have what it takes to get through. These feelings can contribute to chronic stress and burnout.
What we can do is try to notice the specific feelings and emotions, and what precisely they are in response to. The goal is to design effective responses that calm and adapt to the stress response, and prevent it from becoming chronic.
Managing a normal response to keep it in check
The first goal is to accept that stress and exhaustion can be part of normal life and work, and to learn adaptive and healthy ways to manage it. That’s simple, but it’s not at all easy! Our next articles look at what we can do to prevent burnout and respond to and manage stress, exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed when they occur.
In addition, a series of articles on caring for ourselves and our wellbeing will go through realistic and practical strategies for managing stress and exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed at work.
Next in this series: Part 2: Diving deeper into burnout, a serious threat for educators